Tag: Japan

May 20, 2019 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. The temple is on fire. The warlord Nobunaga makes his last stand against the henchmen of a traitorous underling. Hearing someone kicking open a side-door, three attacking samurai rush in to execute an escapee, only to face a terrifying, ash-smeared demon. “In person they had never seen before a shadow so tall, […]

May 12, 2019 · 0 comments

by Jeremy Clarke. Teenage high school movie Blue Spring (2001) centres on the leader of a violent boys’ gang in their final year at school. The nonchalant Kujo (Ryuhei Matsuda) has befriended Aoki (Hirofumi Arai in his debut role) since the latter first joined his class in their infancy: these days Aoki is Kujo’s number […]

May 11, 2019 · 0 comments

Makoto Ogino, who died of renal failure on 29th April, spent his whole life preoccupied with the wheel of karma. On the day of his very first sale, his father, an education officer responsible for censuring unsuitable books, pleaded with him not to become the sort of manga creator whose works would get denounced in […]

April 30, 2019 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. “When I was in third grade, I spent September and October researching square things.” It is a typical statement from Aoyama, the super-serious pre-teen narrator of Tomihiko Morimi’s Penguin Highway.  It is a comment of simple truth, but hints at statistical obsessions, an eidetic memory, and an inadvertent hint of recursive SF, […]

April 27, 2019 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. “Perfect Blue is a very twisted film. Please keep in mind that (this) will be my personal interpretation and it is not necessarily the right way to interpret the film.” So begins the video talk by director Satoshi Kon included on the Perfect Blue Ultimate Edition. Recorded around 2007, the video shows […]